The View

And so The Year of Barbara has a firm end-date: May 16. That’s the day news icon Barbara Walters will cohost her last episode of The View and retire from full-time journalism. It won’t be a quiet send-off: The View will have a week-long celebration, ABC News is planning a two-hour prime-time retrospective, and you can expect Barbara’s face to be plastered across every network franchise from World News Tonight to Dancing with the Stars. >> Sign up for the AARP …

Both Deadline.com and the Huffington Post, citing unnamed sources, are reporting that iconic TV journalist Barbara Walters, 83, will soon announce that she will retire in May 2014. If those reports turn out to be right, it’ll be the conclusion of a career that spanned more than half a century, during which Walters rose from the lowly post of “Today Girl” on NBC’s Today show to being the first woman co-anchor of a network news broadcast at ABC News in 1976, and a star of …